Because 的 is filed under it, and 的 alone occurs 48,163 times — about 5.2% of every character in the Bible.

How many radicals do I need to know?

The top fifteen in this table cover the great majority of character occurrences; the full set of 244 is a reference list, not a study plan.

Where does the radical data come from?

Make Me a Hanzi, the same open dataset behind the stroke-order animations on the word pages.

244 Radicals Build the Chinese Bible

Answering: “most common radicals Chinese Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

A radical is the component a Chinese dictionary files a character under, and it usually hints at meaning: 亻 for people, 讠 for speech, 心 for the heart and feelings. This page counts radicals the way a reader meets them — weighted by how often the characters carrying them actually occur, not by how many characters exist.

That weighting changes the answer. 亻 (87,420), 白 (50,135), 口 (48,805) lead the list, and the reason 白 ranks so high is a single character: 的, the possessive particle, which is filed under it and is the most frequent character in the text at 48,163 occurrences. Frequency lists of Chinese are always partly a list of grammar.

As a study tool the list works best from the middle down: 讠, 扌, 心, 木 and 阝 recur across hundreds of distinct characters, so learning the radical buys you a guess at the meaning of words you have never seen. The site's guide to radicals covers the forms themselves; this page is about which of them earn their place in Scripture.

The most frequent radicals, weighted by character occurrences

#	Radical	Character occurrences
1	亻	87,420
2	白	50,135
3	口	48,805
4	一	38,642
5	人	33,209
6	土	27,666
7	戈	21,944
8	日	21,315
9	讠	20,928
10	辶	20,834
11	扌	18,058
12	刂	17,315
13	心	17,288
14	木	16,883
15	阝	13,184

100% of the characters in the text have a radical recorded.

Questions

Why is 白 so high?: Because 的 is filed under it, and 的 alone occurs 48,163 times — about 5.2% of every character in the Bible.
How many radicals do I need to know?: The top fifteen in this table cover the great majority of character occurrences; the full set of 244 is a reference list, not a study plan.
Where does the radical data come from?: Make Me a Hanzi, the same open dataset behind the stroke-order animations on the word pages.

Related reference pages

Take it further

97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.

How these numbers were produced

Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.

These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.

Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).